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Comment by pxc | Hacker News Reader

I expect it'll never happen to me. My dad was still actively seeking out new music when I was a kid, streaming college radio via the Internet before Pandora, Last.fm, or Spotify were things. He's in his 60s today and he still listens to new music (in a range of genres) all the time.

If novelty in music is actually important to you, this won't happen to you.

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I had the realization a few weeks ago that I no longer listen to very much from before 2016. I didn’t pay attention to how it happened, but less than 20% of what I have actively listened to in the past 3 years going by all these recap playlists is from before 2016 and I keep adding new music every year. Half of the music from before that cutoff point is basically music that was new to me in the last few years even though it’s older.

I couldn’t imagine thinking that would ever happen 15-20 years ago. I’ve also realized that I’m not interested in trying to change that at all, because I’m now of the opinion that so far music has gotten better every single decade I’ve been alive; and the 2020s are off to a great start on that front.

That's interesting. I'm of the opinion that music is getting worse as time progresses. I must be getting old

> 2020s are off to a great start on that front

Recommendations?

On average, music is big for people during the teenage years, then other things in life take over and that same music continues the biggest music for them.

This is very different if music is a lifelong hobby for you. I'm in my forties and some of the artists I most listen to today I discovered during recent years. Still I find articles like this interesting because I can learn something about a larger demographic while being different myself.

> If novelty in music is actually important to you, this won't happen to you.

Novelty in music of novelty of music? I never considered one could care about the former (it certainly seems orthogonal to popular music, which is all about being new but never novel). So you are actively seeking out to you new genres and artists?

I'm not a completionist, so I'm OK with missing out. I do keep track of artists or (sub)genres to check out, but I very rarely have time to actually check some of it out. I have so much music that the past years I've been deleting more than adding, and I still haven't heard much of it well. Also by now I realize tastes change but also experiences, a song sounds different in different phases of your life it seems.

That's an interesting distinction that I didn't have in mind in my comment. For me, personally, I suppose I'm interested in both (sounds and styles I've never heard, and music whose makings may be familiar to me but which I've not heard yet).

> So you are actively seeking out to you new genres and artists?

Yeah! I generally find that the more music I know and enjoy, the more music I can connect with or appreciate. At the moment I'm developing greater appreciation and taste for house music and extreme metal, while my go-to genres for a long time have tended to be folk and indie rock of various kinds.

> I'm not a completionist, so I'm OK with missing out. I do keep track of artists or (sub)genres to check out, but I very rarely have time to actually check some of it out. I have so much music that the past years I've been deleting more than adding, and I still haven't heard much of it well. Also by now I realize tastes change but also experiences, a song sounds different in different phases of your life it seems.

I'd say I agree with all of this. I used to listen to new artists and genres extremely systematically and dedicate a lot of time to it (many hours every week). Now it's more irregular than that but it certainly hasn't stopped.

Yeah - my taste has pretty steadily churned slowly over and over and over and that's how I like it.

There's so much music out there. It's like asking "when do you stop finding new books": you only stop finding if you stop looking. I enjoy the looking, and I see no risk at all of running out even if no more new stuff is ever made.

> If novelty in music is actually important to you, this won't happen to you.

Assuming what's "actually important to you" remains fixed as you age. The article suggests otherwise, with caveats:

> At the same time, stagnation is not a certainty. Research suggests that open-eardness and the discovery of new songs can be cultivated. Finding new music is a challenge, but it is achievable with dedicated time and effort.

Yep. I'm in my 40's and I still every day check what new albums were released, and listen to as many of them as I can. Of course I take charades to old music every now and then, but over 50% of what I listen is new albums...

I think already this albums thing might leak my age. I guess people don't really listen to albums anymore...

> If novelty in music is actually important to you, this won't happen to you.

One of the most traditional - and important - uses of music was to preserve the oral record, which existed in musical form to make it easier to remember accurately.

I wouldn't expect novelty in music to be important to many people.

For me, at least, the desire for new-to-me music isn't paired with a disdain for repetition or tradition. It's more like that I want to discover more traditions and connect with them, and to develop a better intuition for how the constituents of my musical universe are interconnected.

The traditional use of music you highlight really resonates with the way that I listen to music, incidentally. I joked recently with my roommate that for me, music is poetry with embellishments, while for him, it's drums with embellishments. Lyrical memorization has been a central part of how I've related to most of the music most important to me, too.

I suppose you're right, though. Most people engage relatively casually with music, and that's okay.

Where did I say people engage relatively casually with music? I highlighted a form of engagement that is (a) extremely serious, but (b) actively undermined by novelty.

You're right that a lot of people seem to view lyrics as being at best an annoyance; I've seen multiple people on HN argue with a straight face that in order to translate a song from one language to another language, it's not necessary for the meaning of the new lyrics to be similar to the meaning of the old lyrics.

This is not a sense of "translation" that I'm familiar with for other linguistic phenomena.

I've also seen people take offense at the idea that the concept of a "song" might involve singing.

Me neither, for two reasons. One, I was a DJ briefly as a young person and digging crates for new discoveries and hidden gems is still as fun as ever. And two, I exercise a lot, and you can only run to the same song so many times before it loses its juice (at least temporarily).

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